Biographical History

Biographical History

David Gregory appears to have indexed Folio B (along with Folio C
and Quarto A) in Oxford in late
1699
or early
1700,
when he was gradually completing his magnum opus, the Astronomiae. His
editorial rationale for these apparently random collections is not clear. The
descriptions on the index represent a scattering of items, chiefly notes and
papers of his own in mathematics and astronomy, and of others, including
Apollonius of Perga (262 BC-190 BC), Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Jean
Bernoulli (1667-1748), and Jean Domenique Cassini (1625-1712), with
correspondence among Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), Cassini, Isaac Newton
(1642-1727), his father, David Gregory Sr., and his
uncle, James Gregorie (1638-1675). Non-scientific professional papers that
he meant to include cover, among other things, the
1690
visitation, Scottish ecclesiastical matters, and business and agriculture. As
well, he included a pair of curiosities: 'figures of Louis XIV' and some poems,
'good, bad, and burlesque'. Their dates tend toward his later professional
life, from the visitation onward. Because paleographic evidence suggests that
these pages were not stored carefully, Gregory may have meant them to be more a
stack of back files than an orderly documentary record of anything.

Scope and Content

Scope and Content

The papers of David Gregory consist of:

Most of the scientific content of Folio B comes from early
in Gregory's career. It includes an index of later letters of John Collins
(1625-1683) to James Gregorie (1638-1675), a number of Edinburgh
lectures in geometry, mechanics, and optics, and some tables and manuscript
pieces of 'Elementa Catoptricae et Dioptricae', the 'Institutes of Astronomy',
and the 'Elementa Astronomica'. There are as well several learned papers by
other people. These include an extract from a 1669 planetary orbit paper by
Cassini, a copy of a 1676 paper by Edmund Halley
1656-1742on the geometry of orbital eccentricities,
an outline of a Kepler volume on astronomy, a probability treatise by John
Arbuthnot (1667-1735), and some problems in Apollonius, with a
Latin translation of this geometer from Arabic by Edward Bernard (1638-1696),
along with a fair copy of the same by David Gregory. A paper of Gregory's own
is an evaluation of Hipparchus' ancient explanation of the solstice. The rest
of the collection is a record of Dr Gregory's wider life as an academic and a
government consultant. Six items relate to his woes surrounding the College
visitation. Others consist of the
1692 inaugural speech of his brother James
(Gregory-not Gregorie), also a mathematician, upon his own appointment to the
faculty in Edinburgh, a pair of drafts of job vacancy notices for Glasgow
College, an anonymous printed lampoonery of Cassini, and an Oxford book list on
horticulture. Traces of his official self remain in some
1697 correspondence between the King of Great
Britain and the Senate of Hamburg, regarding trade with the 'Indian' venture of
Scotland, and in the acts of three Scots provincial synods; of his personal
self there are still a pair of poems from the handful he originally collected
in the Folio. A curiosity, penned on the back of item 6, is a short song in
English, with its music; it is not in Gregory's hand.